The present invention relates generally to wireless communication and voice paging. More particularly, the present invention relates to a voice paging system that electronically converts a typed message to a voiced message and delivers the voiced message to a voice pager unit or voice mail recorder.
Presently, a person who is travelling or at a remote location can be paged or contacted by wearing a small beeper unit that notifies the person when someone is trying to reach him or her. Usually, a caller will call the person's beeper number using a telephone, and the paging center associated with that beeper number will send a signal to the beeper unit to alert the person of the call and to display the caller's telephone number to identify the caller. Some beeper units may also display a short message such as, for example, "urgent" or "meeting postponed."
A person can also carry a cellular telephone if he/she wants to remain in contact with others while travelling or at a remote location. However, a cellular phone generally requires the person to respond to an incoming call or lose it. Therefore, if the person does not want to be disturbed and turns the cellular phone's ringer off, incoming calls may be lost. Although some cellular phones can indicate the number of calls the person received while the ringer was turned off, most cellular phones that are currently available are not equipped to identify the callers' telephone numbers or to display short messages from those callers, and therefore those calls will be lost.
In many situations, communication by electronic mail (e-mail) is preferred over communication by telephone. E-mail allows a person to send and receive mail at his or her convenience, and e-mail is not limited to short messages but can include detailed, lengthy messages. Recently, some paging systems have begun to integrate e-mail messages with standard paging operations by providing for limited transmission of e-mail messages to a pager unit. Such e-mail is usually limited in the number of characters that can be transmitted per paging operation, and lengthy messages that exceed the limit may be indiscriminately truncated.
Voice paging systems will soon allow transmission of voiced messages to a voice pager unit, which is a unit for receiving voiced messages that is analogous to a beeper unit for receiving text messages. However, these voice paging systems will likely require recording of the caller's voiced message, similar to leaving a message on a telephone answering machine, or may even require an operator at the voice paging center to read a text message such as an e-mail message into a voice mail recorder for later transmission to the voice pager unit.